Subject: Re: The IETF Mission

From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 11:01:24 -0800 (PST)

*> 
  *> If it is important, it'll progress the work of some group in the
  *> IETF and be archived as an RFC. If it (the I-D) doesn't capture work
  *> well enough to be archived as an RFC then it ought to fade from IETF
  *> I-D storage.

Grenville,

Not all important ideas enter the working group process and emerge
as standards, and the fact that some working group chooses not to
"capture" an document does not make it necessarily unworthy of
preservation.  After all, the technical problems evolve, and our
solutions need to evolve too; ideas that did not make it at one
stage may turn out to be important in the future.  And, I believe
you are surrendering too easily the over-emphasis on standards
that Fred decried in his message.

  *> 
  *> Is the standard for Informational currently that onerous?

Certainly not.  But the community (and especially its chosen
leadership) need to believe in the importance of using Informational
to capture important documents and ideas as RFCs.

Bob Braden

---

From: "Eric A. Hall" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 13:51:35 -0600

On 1/19/2004 1:01 PM, Bob Braden wrote:

> stage may turn out to be important in the future.

Another approach here is to allow for the creation of ad-hoc WGs. That
would provide a cleaner path for tangential documents that don't fit
within existing charters, and would facilitate broader group review of
independent submissions. Speaking for myself, I've written some drafts
that I would have liked to seen progressl, but didn't fit in existing WGs,
and the requirements for new WGs were too stringent to pursue. This latter
 issue is also one of the reasons behind the relatively low involvement
from the developing-world community, and exacerbates the feelings of
powerlessness and resentment that end up costing us recovery time fighting
off the well-meaning fools who would make this problem worse by handing
control to organizations with even higher barriers of entry.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/

---

From: Pekka Savola <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 23:44:00 +0200 (EET)

> control to organizations with even higher barriers of entry.

Maybe you have a common(?) fallacy that once a WG is established, you 
start to magically a better and broader review of the drafts.

Often this is not the case.

But the core point is, I think, how can one attract the reviewers or 
people in general to read and send feedback on an idea which has been 
documented in an Internet-draft.  This is obviously a difficult 
problem, as everybody probably thinks their work is special.

One thing which *might* make it easier, for the drafts which relate to
existing technologies, is if there were "maintenance teams" for the
core protocols, with mailing-lists one could spam one's ideas to,
hoping for feedback from the people interested in a subject.  Not sure
if that would help significantly though..
 
-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 14:47:51 -0700 (MST)

> > preservation.  ...

> ... 

Let's see if I've got all of this straight:

 - The IETF is working on a Dilbert Standard compliant Mission Statement.
  The Dilbert Mission Statement Standard requires foursquare support
  of all virtues and opposition to all vices, without unnecessary
  (read "any") limitations.

 - There are many wonderful ideas that are so awesome that if they were
  self-published, their publishers cannot be slashdotted and would
  never be indexed by Google.  To remedy this unfair lack of publishers
  and de facto censorship, the IETF will go into competition with the
  ACM, IEEE, etc. in both the refereed academic publish-or-perish
  business (e.g. CACM or *Transactions) and the random research notes
  business (SIGCOMM).

 - Salescritters, marketoons, and trade rag espurts find it inconvenient
  to utilize the IETF imprimatur by submitting I-Ds (possibly pushed
  to Informational) and then advertising compliance.  To fix this
  terrible shortcoming of the IETF Standards Process that hinders
  innovatation by Microsoft and other leading edge organizations, the
  new IETF Mission Statement will require that anyone who wants a WG
  can have one.

I think those are excellent proposals, although perhaps not for the
same reasons as other adovcates.  I've been complaining about nonsense
I-Ds and write-only RFCs for many years.  The most effective way to
relive the pressure for junk RFCs and nonsense IDs is to make IETF's
stamp of approval meaningless by giving it to anything and everything
that comes along.  Within a matter of at most a year or two, RFCs might
go back to what they were 20 years ago.

To solve any funding problems or overwork of the IESG,
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/wg-dir.html will become an automated
index of links much like http://reshmeat.net/ and we'll do away with
Last Calls. 

Let's hurry up and advance or at least archive these IDs before they expire:

  draft-terrell-internet-protocol-t1-t2-ad-sp-06.pdf
  draft-terrell-iptx-dhcp-req-iptx-ip-add-spec-00.pdf
  draft-terrell-iptx-dns-req-iptx-ip-add-spec-03.pdf
  draft-terrell-iptx-spec-def-cidr-ach-net-descrip-01.pdf

Vernon  Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 15:06:22 -0800

Good grief.

I don't know that we're changing anything in what the IETF does. What is 
happening is that the IETF is growing up and taking control of its own 
destiny in a variety of ways, and trying to clean up its own processes. In 
all the *other* problems it tries to solve, the IETF tries to say what 
problem it is solving sometime before finishing solving it, if for no other 
reason so that it can decide whether it did in fact solve it. Same here.

I can't speak for the others who took a crack at a mission statement, but 
I'll bet that each would articulate what he was trying to do about the same 
way that I do: I was trying to state in a few pithy words what I thought 
was important about the IETF. The purpose of the mission statement is to 
say what is core - what it is that is so important that if we screw it up 
we screwed up. If we tried to describe "what Vernon does all day" and wound 
up saying something about wearing a dress, my guess is that we could be 
accused of screwing up. If we described "what Vernon does all day" in terms 
of having ideas and articulating them, perhaps we hit closer. If we were 
trying to figure out processes to ensure that Vernon succeeded in doing 
what was important, processes that helped the latter might be more 
valuable. Am I close? The same is true of the IETF; hence the question.

I proposed the wording that I did because to me, the most important things 
the IETF does include
  - discussion of engineering issues in the Internet,
  - improvement of understanding of engineering issues in the Internet,
  - creating white papers that embody that understanding of engineering
    issues in the Internet, and
  - creating specifications for protocols that improve the engineered
    behavior of the Internet.

Some of the outcomes of the fourth bullet get labeled "standards", because 
we agree to call them that and because we agree to implement them, but by 
no means do all, and certainly the items on the third bullet don't. The 
observation that of all documents that have RFC numbers about 2/7 (1014 out 
of 3681) are Proposed Standards, Draft Standards, Full Standards, or Best 
Current Practice documents is not a call for more documents. It is also not 
a call to archive documents that are not felt to contribute valuable 
insights to our community memory. It is an observation of fact. 2/3 of the 
documents in the RFC series are *not* specifications. They are discussion 
of problems, of architecture, of requirements, and so on. They are the 
documents that a purely standards-oriented organization would never pursue, 
but which improve our understanding of the subject at hand.

Once we have decided that we did in fact solve the problem before us, I 
don't know that the bumper sticker gets us all that much further. But the 
bumper sticker can be helpful when we are asking the questions "what are we 
trying to accomplish?" and "are we accomplishing it?".

Dilbert may have something to say about it, but I personally am not a 
management consultant...

---

From: "Eric A. Hall" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 17:39:34 -0600

On 1/19/2004 3:47 PM, Vernon Schryver wrote:

>> Another approach here is to allow for the creation of ad-hoc WGs.
>> That would provide a cleaner path for tangential documents that don't
>> fit ...
> 

No (although I'm not really sure you tried). "Ad-hoc" isn't supposed to
mean 'anything goes', but about providing an alternative channel to BOFs.

I'm sure there was a time where discouraging potentially frivolous efforts
by imposing a high cost of entry was considered a positive benefit of the
design. It still might be. If the objective is to broaden the scope and
quantity of documents to be published, however, lowering that bar would be
useful. Speaking for myself and others, getting volunteer part-timers from
multiple different continents to the same meeting is a pain, and the
payoff is so far into the future and marginal that it usually isn't worth
the cost involved.

---

From: grenville armitage <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 10:39:49 +1100

Bob Braden wrote:
> as standards,

True, but to be fair, I actually said "...to be archived as an RFC." Although
I might appear to have succumbed to "RFC == standard" mentality, I haven't
really :)

> and the fact that some working group chooses not to
> preservation.

Yes, that's true. I simply believe that we already have a mechanism in
our posession for WGs (who are the best judges) to archive their developed
wisdom and insights - the Informational RFC. If WGs aren't using this method
then that's a problem we can fix without creating an indestructable I-Ds.
I'd hope. (I've used Informational status for this very purpose myself a
few times, so I'm biased.)

>  After all, the technical problems evolve, and our

Hopefully you were thinking of someone else ;)

> to capture important documents and ideas as RFCs.

Absolutely agree.

cheers,
gja
-- 
Grenville Armitage
http://caia.swin.edu.au
I come from a LAN downunder.

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 19:18:18 -0700 (MST)

> From: grenville armitage <[email-masked]>

> then that's a problem we can fix without creating an indestructable I-Ds.

IETF rules to the contrary, I-Ds are indestructable for anyone who
cares to look for them.  Every several months I'm moved to point to
classic I-Ds that should have been destroyed as proof that almost
anyone can submit an I-D that says almost anything, no matter
how...ah...controversial.  I have never failed to find copies somewhere
on the net.  Today the only aspect of an I-D that expires after 6 months 
is the endorsement implicit in a copy at venera.isi.edu or www.ietf.org.

Today an endorsement of some sort is the only difference between having
your ideas heard by self-publishing and having them officially published.
The web is taking us a major step forward to 400 or 500 years ago when
good ideas were self-published and readers didn't need the moderation
of a Rupert Murdoch or the IETF.  I don't know what the academic
publish-or-perish, RIAA, and other commercial and mass media worlds
will do to replace their citation indecies, royalties, and advertising
revenues, and I don't much care.

I'm not saying anything against WGs producing Informational RFCs. 
I'm only pointing out that calls to have the IETF Mission Statement
"broaden the scope and quantity of documents to be published" suggest
ignorance of search engines or needs to have things endorsed by the IETF.

] From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>

] I don't know that we're changing anything in what the IETF does. What is 
] happening is that the IETF is growing up and taking control of its own 
] destiny in a variety of ways, and trying to clean up its own processes. In 
] all the *other* problems it tries to solve, the IETF tries to say what 
] problem it is solving sometime before finishing solving it, if for no other 
] reason so that it can decide whether it did in fact solve it. Same here.

The facilitators hired by H-R departments to run mission statement
"off-sites" always say all of that.  They are always perfectly sincere
and well meaning.  Those good intentions do not change the fact that
trying to write a mission statement changes the organization.  If an
organization lacks an unstated consensus purpose, then writing a mission
statement is unlikely to create one.  On the other hand, trying to
write one exposes any lack of consensus and turns into a race to the
Dilbert Standard of advocating all virtues, condemning all vices, and
creating new mandates such as "ad hoc WGs" and "archived I-Ds."

You could be right and I might be wrong if much this thread were not
filled with talk about turning the IETF an unfunded Reed Elsevier.

] ...
] Once we have decided that we did in fact solve the problem before us, I 
] don't know that the bumper sticker gets us all that much further. But the 
] bumper sticker can be helpful when we are asking the questions "what are we 
] trying to accomplish?" and "are we accomplishing it?".

It's one thing to consider those questions and something else to write
a "mission statement."  Mission statement facilitators always say the
only purpose is to consider those to questions, but the results are
what they always are.  Those results are related to the fact that they're
officiously titled "Mission Statements" instead of "ad hoc comments
about what we're trying to do and how well we're doing it."

I know many of you must have been through Mission Statement charades.
Have you ever seen one that with 12 months hindsight was not a waste
of time or worse?  My personal experience suggests that "write a mission
statement" means the same as "jump the shark."  See
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22jump+the+shark%22

---

From: grenville armitage <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 13:51:40 +1100

> > then that's a problem we can fix without creating an indestructable I-Ds.
	[..]
> I have never failed to find copies somewhere

That's the extent of my observation. The implicit endorsement of
storing an I-D at www.ietf.org should be temporary. If people want to
store/publish/whatever a document elsewhere, well, that's fine and dandy.
This thread was (I thought) about an IETF-endorsed archivive of I-Ds,
which I object to as unnecessary. I suspect we may agree.

cheers,
gja

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 22:08:50 -0600

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bob Braden" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
Sent: Monday, January 19, 2004 1:01 PM
Subject: Re: The IETF Mission

> to capture important documents and ideas as RFCs.

Just to be clear - in
http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/ietf/Current/msg23935.html I made a
snotty remark wondering what the average time-to-publish from first
draft to RFC for Informational RFCs is.

I was trying to say what Bob said more clearly (first time that's
happened today, of course). If you look up "Informational RFC" in
2026, it's not that bad. If we lived in the world of 2026, we would
publish more of them, especially individual drafts. HIP Architecture
is a wonderful example of an Informational RFC-to-be.

Spencer